Untitled (Karen Blixen with her friend Erik von Otter), photographed by Thomas Dinesen between 1921 and 1925
Image: courtesy of Messums
Messums, the UK gallery known for 20th-century and contemporary British art, has launched a new photography department with an inaugural London exhibition straight out of Africa. And a rare archive of 15 photographs of Karen Blixen, the Danish author whose memoir of life in pre-war Kenya became an Oscar-winning film, provides historically sensitive material for the gallery’s new venture.
The vintage prints, from the early 1920s, were mostly taken by Blixen’s younger brother, Thomas Dinesen, a veteran of the First World War and recipient of the VC. They feature informal shots of Blixen at home on her coffee farm in the foothills south-west of Nairobi—seen with her dogs, on horseback, taking tea—but also staged, awkward pictures of her black servants and local natives lined up for the camera, images fashioned by colonialist attitudes.